Hello Weekend!

Hello weekend, I am so happy to see you! Before I get to the weekend links, I thought I’d do a brief review of the Lomography film scanner I posted about earlier this week. All in all, I’d give it a C. It’s a little gizmo designed to allow you to easily scan film into digital negatives. I couldn’t quite figure out how that would work conceptually, and it turns out there’s a few more digital steps involved than the box directions point you to. First, you end up taking a tiny picture of the negative (it took me a ton of fiddling to even get the image to show up on my iphone screen). Then you need to crop and rotate the image (I did this in the app Afterlight, which is my favorite for editing on the go). After that, you have to pull it into an app that has a negative conversion feature (I used Photoshop Express). Then, it still looked jinky, so I pulled it into Lightroom to play around with it. Final result is what you see here (my Dad, Uncle & some random guy circa 1960 something – very Mad Men). I didn’t love any of the Lightroom fixes, other than turning it into a black and white shot, but I thought that lost some of the magic of the image being on color film in the first place. Bottom line, I will be taking my old negatives to the camera store to have them professionally scanned. This is a fun toy, but not for serious archiving.

(Side note on old negatives – they remind you how precious a frame of film was, there is only one frame of each group of people in this strip, and in almost every one someone has their eyes closed. No second chances though – you opened your eyes or lived with them forever closed for that moment in time.)